Sheila Weller - Dancing at Ciros: A Familys Love, Loss, and Scandal on the Sunset Strip

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

For Liz, with love.

We got through it, and we got the best from them

which we passed on to our three wonderful children.

My eye was caught by something shining in the bottom of the ditch. I reached my hand down and picked it up; it made my heart thump for I was certain it was gold. Then I saw another.

SAWMILL CONSTRUCTION ENGINEER

JAMES MARSHALL, 1848

For we were the luckiest Jews who ever lived. We are even the spoiled brats of Jewish history.

ESSAYIST AND PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

LEON WIESELTIER, 2002

For the first twelve years of my life my family enjoyed a kind of blessed existence, and yet, for some reason that I could not articulate, and with no external clues, I was consumed with a prescient dread. Please let it always be like this, I, a nonreligious child, would murmur to God. Please let our lives always stay this way.

My father, whom I adored, was a charismatic neurosurgeon, one of only about fifteen practicing in Los Angeles County and only about 520 at work in the entire country at the time. He performed the most intense and complex operations, often saving, sometimes losing, livesneurosurgery was a risky business in those days. On Sunday he was a Man of the Sea, the proud captain of our seventy-foot sailing sloop, the Manuiwa . Trimming main and jib sheets, listing to port and starboard, our family, wet and laughing, rode the choppy blue-black sea off Newport Harbor, and when we came back to shore we compared notes with our slipmates, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

My mother was a former newspaperwoman, Hollywood columnist, and magazine writer, never quite meant to be the luncheon-going doctors wife the times required her to beit was a role she performed ambivalently, and badly. Irreverent, funny, and disdainful of all things smug and stuffy, she was a transplanted New Yorker who divided humanity between the go-getting, sparkly bright people and the plodding, pitiable drab ones. Her brothers nightclub, Ciros, was the most glamorous nightclub in the world, a driving force in the lore and evolution of Hollywood. My mother was my uncles business partner; Ciros was the air our family breathed, a nightly fount of glittery melodrama that could not help but outsparkle every other aspect of our familys life.

I grew up in that nightclub. When I was four and five and six and seven, my mother picked me up after school and drove me to Ciros, to wait while she huddled deep in business with my uncle in the office upstairs from the kitchen. Id suck maraschino cherries in Bobby the bartenders long, cavelike service bar, its floorboards marinated with twenty-five years of libations, as humid and perfumed as a rain forest. Then Id circle the large main room, its round wooden tables naked until roped bundles of linens, tossed in like hay bales by Mexican busboys, were knifed open and flapped over the dark green leather banquettes. I helped Nancy the photographer fold the cardboard photo holders and line up the Ciros lipsticks on the Dutch doorsill. Then Id assist Reggie the cigarette girl in stacking the Old Golds and Camels and (brand-new) Marlboros in the tray attached to the velvet rope that she would later wear above her thigh-high skirt and fishnet stockings. Out on the floor, the long-legged girls in toreador pants, with Grace Kelly scarves over hair rollers, huddled with orchestra leader Dick Stabile while mike cords were whipped and baby spots dimmed: These are the Prousts madeleines of my childhood.

The big, two-tiered nightclub bulged with secrets; you could tell from the almost theatrical circumspection of Johnny the matre d, whose impeccable graciousness and not-quite-sardonic expression told you hed seen everything and then some. Much later, he told me some of what hed sealed his lips to: that Walter Winchell consistently came in with Marilyn Monroe, and that the two sat huddled all night at a tiny table. Winchell was so powerful their dates never got into the papers. He told me that Sammy Davis Jr. was indeed forced by Harry Cohn to break up with Kim Novak, and that the entertainer was so upset about Cohns order that he sobbed backstage, uncontrollably. He also said that Frank Sinatra, melancholic after Ava Gardner left him, used to get drunk at the club and once took a few swings in the lobby at a reporter who dared notice.

The very air of Ciros was charged with a sensuality that even a child could feelits booths draped with exotic-smelling people who tossed their heads carelessly, smoked their cigarettes deliberately, and cuddled close together (mink stoles slipping off shoulders), laughing as if at a series of very private jokes. Insinuation, flirtation, irony, and (when Peggy Lee, Billy Eckstine, or Nat King Cole performed) a delicious pathos perfused the room. Ciros was a place of sublime conceita diorama celebrating clever peoples ability to restyle themselves according to their passions. It was heady, but also unsettling: Amid those louche patrons, my normal family seemed emotionally ingenuous, too naive to withstand the buffeting of a hedonism they could admire and mimic but whose inner rules and secret safety valves they could not fathom. Despite my youth, I sensed that when you live your life in a Hollywood nightclub, whether youre prepared or not, your life is destined to follow the curve of the melodrama. That is why, on the drive home after the first show, Ia sleepy passenger, twisting in the backseat, gazing at the bucket of lights past the undulating ridge of Sunset Boulevardwould intone that strange prayer, Please let it always stay this way

* * *

January 8, 1958, was an unseasonably warm winter evening, even for Southern California. A record-breaking eighty-degree afternoon had yielded to an evening still warm enough for me to go up the flagstone walk from the car to the house with no sweater over my cap-sleeved cotton shirtwaist. That dress, which I wore collar turned up with a scarf tied around my neck, must have been navy blue or burgundy, because my sister Lizzie and I were going to dinner with our father, a man equally merry and authoritarian, who liked us to dress like East Coast private school girls: tailored, in sharp white andonly soliddark colors.

As a man of serious accomplishment ensconced, by way of marriage, within a show business family, my father, Daniel Weller, was a picture of ambivalence. He was seduced by that world, but he also stood apart from it, viewing himself, with a cocky and sometimes bitter pride, as the lone representative of worthy pursuit in a swelling pond of frivolity. His clothes policy was one small way he could put his stamp on his progeny and trumpet a sensibility more refined than that of his obtrusively famous brother-in-law, Ciros owner, Herman Hover.

If there was a secret tension in our familys life, now bubbling up from just below the surface, waiting for a seminal event to spark a family holocaust long in the making, well, everything until this moment did a good job of obscuring it. The childhood years Lizzie and I were leaving behind usshe was ten, I was twelvecould have been plucked from both an Our Gang and Our Town rerun: The Adohr man left bottles of milk on our back porch every morning; the Wonder Bread bakery sat on Little Santa Monica between Elm and Foothill, just over the railroad tracks, where a freight train toot-tooted as it rumbled through daily. You could buy warm bread straight from the bakerys foreman. Beverly Hills was just waking up from its slumber as a sweet, almost dowdy, small town.